Rich desktop notifications have been available in Google’s Chrome browser for the Mac for some time now, provided you were on the Canary channel where Google hosts early and unstable alpha releases of its browser. The normals, however, had to wait until desktop notifications for the Now cards made their way into the stable Chrome channel.

According to Google itself, that day is today – people on stable Chrome releases should start seeing Google Now alerts being pushed to their Macs and PCs. The handy alerts are nested right inside the browser’s notification center that sits in your Mac’s status bar (bottom-right if you’re using Windows)…

Once both mobile and desktop Chrome are using the same Google Account, you should start seeing certain Now cards on your Mac, stuff like weather, sports scores, commute traffic and event reminders cards.

As per Google’s help document, Google Now on Chrome shows a subset of the Now cards you see on your mobile device and some of the cards may be based on the location of your mobile device.

Here’s are Now cards in Chrome for Windows.

As a result, you’ll only see location-based Now cards on your Mac for devices that have Location Reporting turned on. As a reminder, Google keeps on checking for your mobile location even when Chrome is not running.

To turn off Google Now cards in Chrome, click the Chrome Notifications icon in your Mac’s status bar, hit the gear icon and uncheck the box next to ‘Google Now’. Note you won’t see the icon in your Mac’s menu bar unless there are some alerts to show.

It’s a staggered release: Google Now notifications have begun rolling out today and will be gradually enabled for everyone over the course of the next few weeks.

Google Now is pretty awesome and having these cards pop up as timely alerts on my Mac is even better, even more so for those who use Chrome on both their mobile and desktop devices and entrust Google with management of their personal information like contacts, calendars and more.